Orm
, pp. 115–16), as well as the insertions of new readings by "Hand B". Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.]] Orm, or Ormin (1200 fl.) was an early English poet, author of a long poem in Middle English called the Ormulum.Orm, Encyclopædia Britannica]], Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. Web, Feb. 17, 2018. Life Overview Orm was an Augustinian canon of Mercia, who wrote the ''Ormulum in transition English. It is a kind of medieval Christian Year, containing a metrical portion of the Gospel for each day, followed by a metrical homily, largely borrowed from Ælfric and Bede. Its title is thus accounted for, "This boc iss nemmed the Ormulum, forthi that Orm it wrohhte."John William Cousin, "Orm or Ormin," A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1910, 291. Wikisource, Web, Feb. 17, 2018. Biographical details Orm, probably of Danish family, was a monk of the order of St. Augustine, and evidently lived in the Danish territory of England, "in the north-eastern part of the former kingdom of Mercia.’" His book, which is a series of homilies in verse extending from the Annunciation into the Acts, is "named Ormulum," according to the opening lines of the preface — "for that Orm wrought it." The name "Orm" (= Worm) betokens the Scandinavian descent of the author; the variant "Ormin" was possibly formed on the model of "Austin" and similar names. Professor Zupitza's view, that the ending is the French diminutive, seems doubtful (Guy of Warwick, Text B, Early English Text Society, note to l. 9529). There is a strong temptation to see in the suffix the Scandinavian agglutinative definite article; but there is no evidence of its use in proper names at this early period.Gollancz, 254. In a long metrical dedication to Walter, Orm's 3-fold brother — "in the flesh, in baptism, and in the order" — the author explains how, encouraged by his brother, he devoted himself to the task of "turning into English speech" the Gospels of the year, so that English folk might thereby be won to salvation. His method was to give a paraphrase of the Gospel of the day, adding thereto a quaint and mystical exposition. The main sources of his commentary were Bede, Gregory, and perhaps Josephus and Isidore. As Ten Brink pointed out, there seems to have been in the cloister where Orm dwelt little knowledge of the ecclesiastical writers of the new era — men like Anselm, Abelard, Bernard, the celebrities of St. Victor, or like Honorius Augustodunensis. On the other hand, it is saying too much to claim for Orm direct acquaintance with the writings of Ælfric; the alleged influence of Augustine is also very doubtful (Englische Studien, vi. 1–26). Judging by the tone of his dedication, there can be no question that the author regarded the finished work with considerable pride, and felt assured of its popularity. He was anxious — needlessly so — that the original transcript should be faithfully followed in the minutest details by future scribes. There is strong reason to believe that no 2nd copy was ever made, nor can we detect the poet's literary or theological influence on his contemporaries. Writing Little can be said for Orm's poetical talent. Conscious of his deficiencies, he seems to have aimed at a sort of dignified monotony. He has, indeed, a certain sense of art in suiting word to thought, and thought and word to rhythm. His only merit is simplicity. Linguistically, the poem is remarkable for its Scandinavian elements. There are perhaps some half-dozen words of French origin in the whole of Orm's work, and these are contestable (Brate, Paul-Braune's Beiträge, x. 1–80; Zupitza, Guy of Warwick, referred to above, &c.).Gollancz, 255. Historically the Ormulum is of special value as the 1st noteworthy piece of Anglian (i.e. Northern) literature after the Conquest. From this point of view it is hardly 2nd in importance to Layamon's] ‘Brut,’ which, about the same date, marked the reawakening of poetry in the Southern territory. Overview The Ormulum or Orrmulum is a 12th-century work of biblical exegesis, written by a monk named Orm (or Ormin) and consisting of just under 19,000 lines of early Middle English verse. Because of the unique phonetic orthography adopted by its author, the work preserves many details of English pronunciation existing at a time when the language was in flux after the Norman Conquest. Consequently, it is invaluable to philologists in tracing the development of the language. After a preface and dedication, the work consists of homilies explicating the biblical texts set for the mass throughout the liturgical year; it was intended to be consulted as the texts changed, and is agreed to be tedious and repetitive when read straight through. Only about a fifth of the promised material is in the single manuscript of the work to survive, which is in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Orm was concerned with priests' ability to speak the vernacular, and developed an idiosyncratic spelling system to guide his readers in the pronunciation of the vowels. He used a strict poetic metre to ensure that readers know which syllables are to be stressed. Modern scholars use these two features to reconstruct Middle English as Orm spoke it (Burchfield 1987, p. 280). Form It is significant that, whereas the Saxon Layamon used both Teutonic alliteration and Romance rhyme, the Danish Orm rejected both metrical devices, and chose the regular septenarius, an iambic line of 7 and a half feet, divided into 2 half-lines of 8 and 7 syllables respectively. The meter, with the additional adornment of rhyme, had already been employed about 1170 in the south-western poetical homily called Poema Morale (Old English Homilies, Early English Text Society, No. 34, ed. R. Morris). About the author Unusually for work of the period, the Ormulum is neither anonymous nor untitled. The author names himself at the end of the dedication: : At the start of the preface, the author identifies himself again, using a different spelling of his name, and gives the work a title: : The name "Orm" is derived from Old Norse, meaning worm, serpent or dragon. With the suffix of "myn" for "man" (hence "Ormin"), it was a common name throughout the Danelaw area of England. The choice between the 2 forms of the name probably was dictated by the meter at each use. The title of the poem, "Ormulum", is modeled after the Latin word speculum ("mirror") (Matthew 2004, p. 936), so popular in the title of medieval Latin non-fiction works that the term speculum literature is used for the genre. The Danish name is not unexpected; the language of the Ormulum, an East Midlands dialect, is stringently of the Danelaw (Bennett and Smithers 1982, pp. 174–75). It includes numerous Old Norse phrases (particularly doublets, where an English and Old Norse term are co-joined), but there are very few Old French influences on Orm's language (Bennett 1986, p. 33). Another — likely previous — East Midlands work, the Peterborough Chronicle, shows a great deal of French influence. The linguistic contrast between it and the work of Orm demonstrates both the sluggishness of the Norman influence in the formerly Danish areas of England and the assimilation of Old Norse features into early Middle English (Bennett 1986, pp. 259–63). , where the Ormulum was composed: the two nave arcades, although now whitewashed, remain from the church Orm would have known.]] According to the work's dedication, Orm wrote it at the behest of Brother Walter, who was his brother both (biologically) and as a fellow canon of an Augustinian order (Matthew 2004, p. 936). With this information, and the evidence of the dialect of the text, it is possible to propose a place of origin with reasonable certainty. While some scholars, among them Henry Bradley, have held that the likely origin is Elsham Priory in north Lincolnshire (Bennett and Smithers 1982, pp. 174–75), as of the mid-1990s it has become widely accepted that Orm wrote in the Arrouaisian Bourne Abbey, in Bourne, Lincolnshire (Treharne 2000, p. 273). Two additional pieces of evidence support this conjecture: firstly, the abbey was established by Arrouaisian canons in 1138, and secondly, the work includes dedicatory prayers to Peter and Paul, who are the patrons of Bourne Abbey (Parkes 1983, pp. 115–27). The Arrouaisian rule was largely that of Augustine, so that its houses often are loosely referred to as Augustinian (Jack, George, in Matthew and Harrison 2004, pp. 936–37; Parkes 1983, pp. 115–27). Composition The date of composition is impossible to pinpoint. Orm wrote his book over a period of decades and the manuscript shows signs of multiple corrections through time (Burchfield 1987, p. 280). Since it is apparently an autograph, with two of the three hands in the text generally believed by scholars to be Orm's own, the date of the manuscript and the date of composition would have been the same. On the evidence of the third hand, a collaborator who entered the pericopes at the head of each homily, it is thought that the manuscript was finished circa 1180, but Orm may have begun the work as early as 1150 (Parkes 1983, pp. 115–27). The text has few topical references to specific events that could be used to identify the period of composition more precisely. Contents and style The Ormulum consists of 18,956 lines of metrical verse, explaining Christian teaching on each of the texts used in the mass throughout the church calendar (Treharne 2000, p. 273). As such, it is the first new homily cycle in English since the works of Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 990). The motivation was to provide an accessible English text for the benefit of the less educated, which might include some clergy who found it difficult to understand the Latin of the Vulgate Bible, and the parishioners who in most cases would not understand spoken Latin at all (Treharne 2000, 273). Each homily begins with a paraphrase of a Gospel reading (important when the laity did not understand Latin), followed by exegesis (Bennett and Smithers 1982, pp. 174–75). The theological content is derivative; Orm closely follows Bede's exegesis of Luke, the Enarrationes in Matthoei, and the Glossa ordinaria of the Bible. Thus, he reads each verse primarily allegorically rather than literally (Jack, George, in Matthew and Harrison 2004, pp. 936–37). Rather than identify individual sources, Orm refers frequently to " " and to the "holy book" (Bennett 1986, p. 31). Bennett has speculated that the Acts of the Apostles, Glossa Ordinaria, and Bede were bound together in a large Vulgate Bible in the abbey so that Orm truly was getting all of his material from a source that was, to him, a single book. (Bennett 1986, p. 31). Although the sermons have been deemed "of little literary or theological value" (Burchfield 1987, p. 280) and though Orm has been said to possess "only one rhetorical device", that of repetition (Bennett 1986, p. 32), the Ormulum never was intended as a book in the modern sense, but rather as a companion to the liturgy. Priests would read, and congregations hear, only a day's entry at a time. The tedium that many experience when attempting to read the Ormulum today would not exist for persons hearing only a single homily each day. Furthermore, although Orm's poetry is, perhaps, subliterary, the homilies were meant for easy recitation or chanting, not for aesthetic appreciation; everything from the overly strict meter to the orthography might function only to aid oratory (Bennett and Smithers 1982, pp. 174–75). Although earlier metrical homilies, such as those of Ælfric and Wulfstan, were based on the rules of Old English poetry, they took sufficient liberties with meter to be readable as prose. Orm does not follow their example. Rather, he adopts a "jog-trot fifteener" for his rhythm, based on the Latin iambic septenarius, and writes continuously, neither dividing his work into stanzas nor rhyming his lines, again following Latin poetry (Bennett 1986, p. 31). The work is unusual in that no critic ever has stepped forward to defend it on literary grounds. Indeed, Orm was humble about his oeuvre: he admits in the preface that he frequently has padded the lines to fill out the meter, "to help those who read it", and urges his brother Walter to edit the poetry to make it more meet (Treharne 2000, pp. 274–75). A brief sample may help to illustrate the style of the work. This passage explains the background to the Nativity: : Orthography Orm was a purist in orthography, as well as in vocabulary, and may fittingly be described as the first of English phoneticians. The ‘Ormulum’ is perhaps the most valuable document we possess for the history of English sounds. Among its more striking peculiarities is the doubling of consonants to show either that a preceding vowel in a closed syllable was short, or to mark an Old English gemination or long consonant; or to indicate, when it is introduced between two vowels, the length of the first vowel. Furthermore, there are no less than 3 forms of the letter "g": 1 to express the hard strong sound, another the soft sound, and a 3rd the sound dzh. The last point was discovered by Professor A.S. Napier (Academy, 15 March 1890). Rather than conspicuous literary merit, the chief scholarly value of the Ormulum derives from Orm's idiosyncratic orthographical system (Treharne 2000, p. 273). He states that since he dislikes the way that people are mispronouncing English, he will spell words exactly as they are pronounced, and describes a system whereby vowel length and value are indicated unambiguously (Bennett 1986, pp. 31–32). Orm's chief innovation was to employ doubled consonants to show that the preceding vowel is short and single consonants when the vowel is long (Treharne 2000, p. 273). For syllables that ended in vowels, he used accent marks to indicate length. In addition to this, he used two distinct letter forms for "g", using the old yogh for and , and the new "g" for (Jack, George, in Matthew and Harrison 2004, 936–937). His devotion to precise spelling was meticulous; for example, having originally used "eo" and "e" inconsistently for words such as "beon" and "kneow," which had been spelled with "eo" in Old English, at line 13,000 he changed his mind and went back to change all "eo" spellings, replacing them solely with "e" alone ("ben" and "knew"), to reflect the pronunciation (Matthew 2004, p. 936; Jack, George, in Matthew and Harrison 2004, pp. 936–37). The combination of this system with the rigid meter, and the stress patterns this implies, provides enough information to reconstruct his pronunciation with some precision; making the reasonable assumption that Orm's pronunciation was in no way unusual, this permits scholars of the History of the English language to develop an exceptionally precise snapshot of exactly how Middle English was pronounced in the Midlands in the second half of the twelfth century (Matthew 2004, p. 936). Manuscript Only one copy of the Ormulum exists, as Bodleian Library MS Junius 1 (Burchfield 1987, p. 280). In its current state, the manuscript is incomplete: the book's table of contents claims that there were 242 homilies, but only 32 remain (Matthew 2004, p. 936). It seems likely that the work was never finished on the scale planned when the table of contents was written, but much of the discrepancy was probably caused by the loss of gatherings from the manuscript. There is no doubt that such losses have occurred even in modern times, as the Dutch antiquarian Jan van Vliet, one of its seventeenth-century owners, copied out passages that are not in the present text (Jack, George, in Matthew and Harrison 2004, pp. 936–37). The amount of redaction in the text, plus the loss of possible gatherings, led J.A.W. Bennett to comment that "only about one fifth survives, and that in the ugliest of manuscripts" (Bennett 1986, p. 30). The parchment used in the manuscript is of the lowest quality, and the text is written untidily, with an eye to economical use of space; it is laid out in continuous lines like prose, with words and lines close together, and with various additions and corrections, new exegesis, and allegorical readings, crammed into the corners of the margins (as can be seen in the reproduction above). Robert W. Burchfield argues that these indications "suggest that it was a 'workshop' draft which the author intended to have recopied by a professional scribe" (Burchfield 1987, p. 280). It seems curious that a text so obviously written with the expectation that it would be widely copied should exist in only one manuscript and that, apparently, a draft. Treharne has taken this as suggesting that it is not only modern readers who have found the work tedious (Treharne 2000, p. 273). Orm, however, says in the preface that he wishes Walter to remove any wording that he finds clumsy or incorrect (quoted in Bennett and Smithers 1982, pp. 175–76). The provenance of the manuscript before the seventeenth century is unclear. From a signature on the flyleaf we know that it was in van Vliet's collection in 1659. It was auctioned in 1666, after his death, and probably was purchased by Franciscus Junius, from whose library it came to the Bodleian as part of the Junius donation (Holt 1878, pp. liv–lvi). History of MS The unique manuscript of the ‘Ormulum,’ consisting of a single folio volume, preserved among the Junian Collection in the Bodleian Library, is in all probability the author's own copy, or rather a fragment of it; the 20,000 and odd half-lines preserved therein represent merely about one-eighth of the complete work. The earliest notice of the manuscript is to be found in the sale-catalogue of the library of the Dutch philologist, Van Vliet, the friend of Junius, ‘greffier’ or registrar at Breda (1610–1666). Under the head of ‘Libri Miscellani in folio’ the following entry occurs: ‘107. Een oudt Sweeds of Gottisch in Parquement geschreven Boeck over de Evangelium,’ i.e. ‘An old Swedish or Gothic book on the Gospel, written on parchment’ (Catalogus variorum ac insignium librorum in quavis facultate et lingua Doctiss. Viri D.D. Jani Ulitii, J.C., Urbis Bredanæ Graphiarij … Quorum Auctio habebitur … die 12 Julii 1666. Hagæ Comitis, 1666, p. 11). Junius, who was then in the Netherlands, must have attended the sale at the Hague and secured the volume for his collection. An entry on the second flyleaf states that it was purchased by Vliet in 1659. The earlier history of the manuscript is not known. It may have been carried over to Holland a few years before by ‘one of those English exiles who had sought in Breda a refuge from the political excitement then prevailing in this country.’ Junius seems to have used the volume for lexicographical purposes. Early printed notices of the Ormulum are found in the works of Hickes, in Wanley's ‘Catalogue,’ and in Lye's Etymologicon Anglicanum. Tyrwhitt was the 1st to recognize its metrical properties (cf. The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer: to which are added An Essay upon his Language and Versification, an Introductory Discourse and Notes, London, 1775, iv. 64 and n. 62, p. 98, n. 69). Subsequently Conybeare in his Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, and Guest in his History of English Rhythms, emphasised the importance of the work, which was first printed at Oxford in 1852, ‘with Notes and a Glossary by Robert Meadows White, D.D., late Fellow of St. Mary Magdalen College, and formerly professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford.’ In 1878 a new and revised edition by the Rev. Robert Holt, M.A., Christ Church, Oxford, was issued by the Clarendon Press. Significance Orm's book has a number of innovations that make it valuable. As Bennett points out, Orm's adaptation of a classical meter with fixed stress patterns anticipates future English poets, who would do much the same when encountering foreign language prosodies (Bennett 1986, p. 31). The Ormulum is also the only specimen of the homiletic tradition in England between Ælfric and the fourteenth century, as well as being the last example of the Old English verse homily. It also demonstrates what would become Received Standard English two centuries before Chaucer (Burchfield 1987, p. 280). Further, Orm was concerned with the laity. He sought to make the Gospel comprehensible to the congregation, and he did this perhaps forty years before the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 "spurred the clergy as a whole into action" (Bennett 1986, p. 33). At the same time, Orm's idiosyncrasies and attempted orthographic reform make his work vital for understanding Middle English. The Ormulum is, with the Ancrene Wisse and the Ayenbite of Inwyt, one of the three crucial texts that have enabled philologists to document the transformation of Old English into Middle English (Burchfield 1987, p. 280). Publications * Internet Archive: Volume 1; Volume 2. See also *List of British poetss Endnotes A. Quotations are from Holt (1878). The dedication and preface are both numbered separately from the main body of the poem. References * . Wikisource, Web, Feb. 17, 2018. }} * * * * * * Hotes External links ;About *Orm in the Encyclopædia Britannica * * https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Orm_(DNB00)Orm Category:12th century in religion Category:12th century in England Category:12th-century manuscripts Category:Biblical exegesis Category:Middle English language Category:Middle English poems Category:Homiletics Category:Old English language Category:Bodleian Library collection Category:Christianity in medieval England Category:Medieval documents of England